Listen closely to the accelerating surge of Jewish activism on the Darfur issue, and you’ll note something unusual: There are surprisingly few whispers of “but it’s not a JEWISH issue.”
More than any issue in recent memory, the Darfur tragedy has brought together diverse segments of the Jewish community in a struggle that has nothing to do with Jews but everything to do with Jewish values.
Some of that unity will be evident at the April 30 rally in Washington. Hundreds of synagogues, Jewish day schools and local community groups are sending buses to a rally that takes on added urgency every day the slaughter continues and the world community dithers.
That same day, a massive gathering is planned in San Francisco, with a vigil at the Golden Gate Bridge, a rally in Chrissy Field and a concert later that afternoon at Congregation Emanu-El. (For more information, go to www.dearsudan.org.)
This unity will also be displayed in Passover sermons and special projects at synagogues that run the theological gamut.
Darfur has sparked the biggest Jewish mobilization since the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1980s, according to several community leaders, and one of the most broadly based. In a season when Jews look back to both biblical and more recent events that have defined their history — from the Exodus to the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state — it’s not hard to see the reasons why.
Thanks in large measure to a handful of groups and crusading journalists — the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience is an example of the former, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof of the latter — there is simply no way anyone in this country can plead ignorance.
Past genocides have slipped under the media radar screen until it was too late; in Darfur, the alarms were raised early, the human and moral stakes laid out starkly for all to see by individuals and groups with both the angry passion and the credibility to make the case. And the Jewish community, with its own history an ever-present reminder, responded in force.
There is no conceivable silver lining to the Holocaust, but Jewish leaders understand that if anything at all positive can come out of that tragedy, it must be a new understanding that genocide is simply not acceptable and a new resolve that the civilized world can’t just stand by and offer excuses as it takes place.
The lesson “never again” has been imperfectly absorbed. It was ignored in Cambodia and Rwanda, and now the risk is growing that things won’t be any different with Sudan. And each time the killing goes on without all-out efforts to stop it, it is an insult to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
Museums and memorials are fine; Holocaust scholarship is critical to ensure that historical memory is not lost when the survivors and witnesses die. But more than that, the memory of the victims is honored by using their suffering as an impossible-to-ignore message about what happens when hatred spins out of control and when the forces of good are too timid to respond.
What could be more painful than the memory of how civilized nations, including the United States, chose to ignore the early warning signs of Hitler’s Holocaust, when many could have been saved, and downplayed the importance of the issue as the Holocaust accelerated, when there was still hope for some?
Isn’t that one of the core messages of the Holocaust — that the world’s evildoers can achieve their ends when the good people are not informed, or when they are confused into inactivity by the complexities of these situations, or when “practical” considerations take precedence over the moral imperative to save lives?
There were “logical” reasons not to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, just as there are seemingly rational reasons why the United Nations can’t do anything more than wring its collective hands over Darfur, but that doesn’t excuse inaction. When genocide is a risk, these are just self-serving rationalizations.
That was one reason why the founders of the Holocaust Museum in Washington created the Committee on Conscience as an early warning system for new genocides. It’s why most major Jewish groups — the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish World Service, to name just a few — and countless local community councils, synagogues and other groups have made Darfur a top priority.
And it’s why rabbis around the country report that few recent issues have galvanized their congregations as much as Darfur.
Nobody has any illusions that a solution for Darfur is around the corner.
Even if Congress passes the Darfur Accountability Act, which is one of the goals of the upcoming Save Darfur rally, it’s unlikely the government in Khartoum will shut down the militias responsible for the mayhem.
Nobody thinks rallies in Washington and elsewhere will give the spineless U.N. leadership an infusion of backbone.
But Jews of every political and religious persuasion understand that to do nothing in the face of the overwhelming challenge is to turn “never again” into a cheap slogan, not a moral imperative.
It’s Africans who are being killed this time, but Darfur is a critical issue for every Jew who knows the story of Jewish suffering over the centuries and hopes that story can serve as an active force in a world where the threat of genocide remains a daily reality.
James D. Besser is a Washington correspondent for Jewish newspapers across the country.